I'm a Senior Programmer myself, I've been in the business for over 16 years, and I find myself doing a lot of hiring as well.
One of the things I've found most valuable is to ignore the college credentials altogether. I look at previous jobs and look for consistency in what they are working on over the past few years or so. If they are focused on narrow range of tech that is relevant to what I'm hiring for, and that focus has a span of a certain amount of years then I will interview them. Otherwise they get put at the bottom.
In reality most of my best hires have not been college students at all. These are the people that usually learned there stuff early in life and went directly in to pragmatic use of that knowledge. Most of them are either influential in the Open Source community or are Self Employed and loving it.
I've rarely seen any good work come from a college grad. I usually have to spend at least a year to get them up to speed on how this job really works - how to learn the tech they need to know, what it takes to solve the many problems they will continue to face at random, and simply give them the bare tools and knowledge to do the job they were hired to do. In this field you are doing yourself a grave injustice to go to college instead of working. In the years you've spent learning you have lost the good positions to your peers who decided to get a jump on you and are now holding enough experience to make enough to pay for college out of pocket in one year -- yes even in this economy.
I do have one slight caveat to my speech here. I am a business owner as well. I run my own company so that I can get the jobs I want to work in. In essence I work for myself but without the freelancer label :). Oh, and I've never been to college a day in my life. I wasted some money on a correspondence course in Hardware Repair for a few months while I watched computers being outdated by the day it seemed, and I coded because it's what I've done since I was 12. I'm 30 now.
I also run the big projects out there. The ones that IBM, AT&T, Cisco, and Williams F1 Racing hire for. Those are just some of my clients. I'm not trying to be cocky, just trying to point out that this really works -- and it takes a lot of time and effort to get there, so don't waste it in college.
So to summarize, look for the applicants that have enough stable experience in the tech you are looking to use, college grads will probably disappoint you for the first few years but with enough effort on your part with anyone you can apprentice the type of worker you need and they will be what you need indefinitely .. college is a waste of time unless you are already working and don't give up any work experience while learning.
